


Something In The Woods

by stressieboi



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Forest Spirit!Frank, Innocent Teenager!Gerard, M/M, good luck figuring that out, i don't know what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-25
Updated: 2020-01-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:01:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22397506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stressieboi/pseuds/stressieboi
Summary: Something lives in the woods behind his house. It almost feels sinister, but not sinister enough to deter curiosity. Gerard finds that he needs to know what it is, even if he ends up hurt in the process.
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way
Comments: 20
Kudos: 55





	Something In The Woods

**Author's Note:**

> This was a prompt given to me by a dear friend over a year ago, and it was supposed to be part of a larger work. Time has passed, I haven't worked on it, and I think this may be as good as it gets. 
> 
> I haven't talked to this friend in a long time, but I miss them dearly, so I've decided to post this sort of in their honor. Callum, this is for you. I miss you.

For as long as Gerard had lived in the house near the wood, he’d felt a presence.

At first, it was nightmares. Strange dreams came to him in the dead of night - suffocating mist and gnarled trees and crumbled headstones. He was just a boy then, but he would never forget the way that the dreams clung to him, even after waking, and the prickling sensation along his spine as he lied very still, careful not to startle the creature he believed to be watching him.

The nightmares seeped into reality. The clock read three a.m. when Gerard awoke to a pitch black darkness surrounding his bed, the light of his lamp shockingly absent though it had been on when he’d gone to bed. Then, he’d blink, and the darkness would dissolve, like sugar into a swamp. He was seeing things, surely. That was not a man in the reflection of his mirror as he left his room for the school bus. He was hallucinating from lack of sleep. There were no sparks settling atop his skin, a tickle in place of a burn, as he attempted to shade one of his sketches. There certainly was no voice tapping at the underside of his imagination.

But, maybe there was a voice. Even as the nightmares faded into all but nonexistence and the waking dreams evaporated over the course of an abandoned childhood, the voice remained. The owner, always out of sight, hummed to him as a passerby in a crowded hazed of unfamiliar faces. He - the voice was masculine in nature, though Gerard tried not to assume - sang in the periphery of Gerard’s thoughts as he struggled with increasingly difficult homework.

The voice was a secret so sacred that Gerard could not bring himself to even tell Mikey, who knew everything but that there was a man whispering into Gerard’s dreams.

“The woods are a dangerous place to go alone,” it said, though Gerard had not been thinking about the woods behind his house at all. He had been on his bed, sketching a particularly excellent depiction of a cloud of smoke that melded into a slutty vampire girl. Gerard tried to ignore it, but the voice cut through every aspect of his awareness, rattling deep within his stomach. The voice would not be ignored, though Gerard had done his damnedest to do as much. “Don’t go into the woods alone.”

Gerard hadn’t intended to. He _hadn’t_. Except, from that point forward, he couldn’t help but wonder.

As he tucked himself between the covers at night, he couldn’t help but glance out the window towards the inky blackness of wild branches and the unrelenting shadow beneath and beyond that not even the moon could breach. He wondered.

~

The nightmares returned.

The dreams always began the same way: Gerard was trekking through the overgrown expanse of forestry in the middle of the night. All was quiet, save the echo of the wind, his breathing, and his own footsteps. That is, until another set of footsteps began following close behind. Gerard would turn to try and spot the source, but he was alone. He was always alone. Then, suddenly, he was face down in the vegetation, oppression on his back restraining him in the dirt.

“The woods are a dangerous place to go alone,” the voice would say, tone dripping in disappointment. Gerard had let him down. “I told you not to come here. Why don’t you ever listen?”

Once, upon waking, Gerard found leaves beneath his pillow. Another time, there was soil beneath his fingernails. After a particularly terrifying rendition of the same nightmare in which the voice sounded particularly scared as he expressed his concern at Gerard being in the woods alone, Gerard found bruises along his ribcage in the shape of fingerprints.

He wasn’t supposed to go into the woods alone. He shouldn’t go into the woods alone.

Mikey didn’t complain much when Gerard dragged him into the forestry behind their house one day after school, except to say that he didn’t enjoy getting mud on his shoes.

The woods were not treacherous in the tired glow of the afternoon sun. They held none of the horrors that his nightmares promised they would, but Gerard was not disappointed by this. They were only woods. Vines and leaves and roots never killed anyone without an allergy, right? Mikey was largely unimpressed, but said nothing. It was almost as though he knew the importance of Gerard’s search and could sense his brother’s pleasure at not having found the object of his investigation.

That night, there were no nightmares. Gerard awoke mutely and calmly at three in the morning, the obnoxious red glow of his alarm clock mocking him in the eerie silence.

“I told you not to go into the woods,” the voice said, the source beside him on the mattress.

“You told me not to go _alone_. I wasn’t alone,” Gerard replied aloud. The sound was shocking in his ears. He had never responded to the goading in his head before.

The mattress dipped, the body beside him shifting closer into his space. “You’re not very good at following directions.”

“You’re not very good at explanations. I’m not allowed to go into the woods, but you never tell me why. What’s out there?”

“I am, Love. I’m out there.”

Sparks formed along Gerard’s spine, warming him to the core as the heat abandoned his hands and feet. The body beside him shifted once more until calloused fingers trailed along his forearm with mock delicacy. In essence, it felt like a threat. It felt like a promise.

“How can you be out there and in here at the same time?” Gerard mumbled. His words were an empty distraction. He could not focus on them, and could not remember them as soon as they abandoned his mouth.

“I can do lots of things,” the voice replied. The hand traveled to his stomach, where the weight pressed into his stomach. “I can do anything I want.”

Gerard swallowed against his dry tongue, his eyes still glued to the clock as they had been since they opened. “What are you?”

“Something bad,” the voice promised. “But, I like you, Gerard. You’re sweet.” Fingers dug into his flesh towards the hip, dragging upwards to Gerard’s chest. “And soft.” A rogue tongue flicked at Gerard’s ear, closely followed by teeth, which tugged sharply at the shell. “I like the way you squirm.”

“Is that what you want?” Gerard’s voice betrayed his fear in its shaking, however minute in a whisper. “You want me to squirm?”

The voice hummed, lips pressing to Gerard’s ear, his jaw, his neck. “I want everything.”

The weight beside him and the heat belonging to it melted away a moment later, but Gerard remained petrified, his body rigid and still until sleep washed over him once again in the growing light of dawn.

~

Gerard was a fool, and he knew it. He was not supposed to be in the woods - not alone, and not ever - but there he was. The morning breeze encased him, filling his nose with the scent of wet grass and old oak. The sun was in the sky, though still newly risen, and there was enough light to see by. Gerard was still a fool.

It had been weeks since the voice had last spoken to him, threatened him. Gerard wasn’t sure what to do with himself. The absence of dreams was welcome, but unusual. What was life devoid of horror? He hardly knew anymore.

“Hello?” he called into the relative silence. Birds called to each other from somewhere far away, and the breeze rustled the branches above him. The sparks revisited their trail along his spine. “I know you’re there.”

“You missed me.”

Gerard turned, though he expected to see nothing. All he knew was nothing. His life had become a black hole. Instead, his eyes were greeted by the sight of a man, dark hair and piercing eyes standing much closer to his face than anticipated.

Gerard’s mouth could not form a response.

“I hope you realize that the daylight changes nothing. I exist in both the light and the dark,” said the voice - which came from this man before him. He smiled with sharp teeth.

“You- You have a _face_!” Gerard’s mouth said, one step ahead of his brain. _Of course_ the voice belonged to a man, belonged to a face. Had he not felt this man’s tongue against him, his fingers pressing into Gerard’s innocent shape? Somehow, though, he had never imagined a face. Even if he had, he certainly would not have been able to imagine this face, which was equal parts angel and animal.

The man laughed, the sound akin to the clanging of brass bells and something wilder, like a beast ripping meat from bone. “Silly, silly boy,” he laughed. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Why not?”

The warmth in the air stripped away as the birds became quiet. There was a glint in the man’s eyes, which Gerard could register as a twirling, unnatural combination of greens and yellows. “This forest belongs to me,” he said. “Only me. All that lives here, all that dies here, all that is buried beneath this soil is my domain.”

The man waved his hand in a short, swooping motion. The calloused fingers that Gerard had come to know in their previous exploration of his body were coated in patterns that appeared to be natural formations within the tissue, and the wind pushed Gerard backwards several feet as it followed their instruction. It was a demonstration, the warning underlying.

“You’re sending a lot of mixed signals,” Gerard replied, attempting to seem unfazed by the danger in which he had placed himself. “You can’t come into my room - into my _head_ , for fucks sake! - and then tell me to stay away from you! You can’t terrorize my childhood and then tell me not to try and understand.”

Gerard blinked and the man was before him, a mere breath between them. He was shorter than Gerard, but that didn’t matter. He was much more potent.

“Yes,” he said, “I can. I can do anything I want. Especially here, in my woods. Especially to you.”

“Why? Who are you? _What_ are you?”

The man was silent for a moment, his eyes sparking as the colors shifted turbulently. “You may call me Frank, if you’d like. I’m the spirit of the forest, and you and your family are invaders.”

“So, what?” Gerard asked, trying to understand. “You want us to leave?”

“Yes… and no.” The man - Frank - smiled darkly. “At first, I wanted you to suffer. Part of me _still_ wants you all to suffer. The other part of me, though…” Frank pointedly glanced down at Gerard’s lips as he dropped his voice into a silky whisper. “The other part of me wants something else.”

Gerard blinked, surprise washing over him before giving way to near-hysteria. Seriously? This man, this _monster_ , had the nerve to haunt Gerard’s childhood, driving him to what felt like the brink of insanity, and then _hit on him_? It was simultaneously the most flattering and offensive thing that had ever happened to him.

Frank pushed Gerard backwards, the collision with a nearby tree effectively wrenching Gerard from his thoughts. “Leave now, please,” Frank commanded. “Before I change my mind about the suffering.”

“Are you going to follow me?” Would the nightmares return? Would the sparks catch fire beneath his skin?

Frank’s grin bared his sharp teeth. “Do you want me to follow you?”

Gerard wasn’t sure how to answer without saying something that would inevitably cause the death of himself and his entire family, so he said nothing. He thought that he heard Frank’s laughter follow him in his retreat, but the sound disappeared as he broke through the trees and was once again in the open air of his minuscule backyard, the old house before him.

~

Mikey was skeptical at first. Reason and logic declared that his older brother had simply lost his mind. The truth was clear, however. Mikey may have been incredibly near sighted, but he had never been blind to the phenomenon in their childhood home. His mind was harder to penetrate, but he’d had the odd nightmare, heard the whispers in the dark. He had seen the shadows following Gerard and pretended that they did not exist. He knew the reality of the situation, no matter how much he didn’t want to.

“Why you?” Mikey asked when Gerard finished his story. “Why does he like you?”

It was a fair question. Gerard stood in a perpetual slouch, his hair was long and greasy, and he carried a little extra weight in his tummy. His nose was pointed like a pixie’s, his teeth were oddly small and square, and he tended to talk with one side of his mouth. At seventeen, Gerard wasn’t exactly a stud.

“I’m not sure,” Gerard answered truthfully. He still couldn’t figure it out.

“On _Supernatural_ , they make salt circles to keep ghosts and demons away. Do you think that would help?”

“He’s a spirit, not a ghost. I’m pretty sure there’s a difference. Like, on _Avatar: The Last Airbender_ , where the panda spirit got pissed because the Fire Nation burned down his forest? It might be more like that.”

“So, what? We’re fucked unless we can find an Avatar mediator to defuse the situation?”

Gerard sighed and scrubbed a hand over his eyes. He hadn’t been sleeping well, even barren of nightmares. “I don’t know. I just know what he said.”

“Do you think he’d go away if we burned down the forest?”

“I think that would probably just make him madder, and we’d also probably take down our house with it.”

“Fair enough.”

They were out of ideas.

“Let’s not worry about it anymore, okay?” Mikey suggested. “You haven’t been having nightmares and he’s been leaving us alone. We don’t need to worry about defense until he goes on the offensive again.”

Gerard didn’t like that thought, but he nodded and agreed anyway. He couldn’t think of anything else to do.

~

Gerard awoke to hands on his stomach, soft designs etched carefully into supple flesh. “Gerard,” Frank’s voice drawled over his ear. Gerard could almost feel the sensation of foreign breath. “Gerard…”

“I haven’t been in the woods,” Gerard replied, lying in rigid stillness. “I didn’t do anything.”

Frank huffed out a laugh, the sound reverberating within Gerard’s head. “Oh, I know.”

The breathing became labored as the hands roamed further, caressing hips and ass and thighs, nails digging in delectably as they dragged.

“Then, why are you here? I thought you said there would be no suffering.” Gerard could feel the panic bubbling up in his throat.

“Gerard…” The voice hummed and Gerard’s ear felt wet, a tongue was gliding along the shell. “Does this feel like suffering?”

The weight of another body pressed against Gerard, and he could feel the long-faded sparks igniting once more beneath his skin.

“Seriously,” Gerard said through clenched teeth as Frank ground against him. “Mixed signals.”

“I’m aware.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'M A SLUT FOR CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM.
> 
> Yell with me on my Tumblr, stressiboi.


End file.
